The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  Dummling sat down and was very sad, but then suddenly he noticed that there was a trapdoor beside the feather. He lifted it up, found steps descending, and went down into the earth. There he came to another door, at which he knocked, and from the inside he heard:

  Virgin, green and small,

  Shrivel leg,

  Shrivel leg’s dog,

  Shrivel back and forth.

  Let’s see who is outside.

  The door opened and Dummling saw an enormous fat toad sitting there, surrounded by a circle of little toads. The fat toad asked him what he wanted, and he answered that he would like to have the finest and most beautiful carpet. The toad called a young toad, saying:

  Virgin, green and small,

  Shrivel leg,

  Shrivel leg’s dog,

  Shrivel back and forth.

  Bring me the big box.

  The young toad fetched the big box, which the big toad opened, and from it she gave Dummling a beautiful carpet, a carpet so beautiful and so delicate that it could never have been woven on earth. He thanked her for it and climbed up again.

  The two other brothers thought their youngest brother too silly ever to be able to find anything, so they bought some coarse linen stuff which the first shepherd woman they met was wearing around her body and took it home to the king. At the same time Dummling came home with his beautiful carpet, and when the king saw it he said, “By rights the kingdom should go to the youngest.” But the other two gave their father no peace, saying that it was impossible to give Dummling the kingdom because he was so stupid, and they asked for another competition.

  So the king said that the one who could bring the most beautiful ring should have the kingdom. Again he performed the same ritual with the three feathers. Again the two eldest went to the east and to the west, and for Dummling the feather went straight ahead and fell down by the door in the ground. Again he went down to the fat toad and told her that he wanted the most beautiful ring. She again had the big box fetched and from it gave him a ring which gleamed with precious stones and was so beautiful that no goldsmith on earth could have made it. The other two again laughed about Dummling who wanted to hunt for a gold ring, and they went to no trouble but knocked the nails out of an old cartwheel and brought that to the king. When Dummling showed his gold ring, the king again said that the kingdom belonged to him. But the two elder brothers tormented the king until he set a third competition and said that the one who brought home the most beautiful wife should have the kingdom. He blew the three feathers again, and they fell as before.

  Dummling went to the fat toad and said that he had to take home the most beautiful woman. “Oh,” said the toad, “the most beautiful woman is not at hand just now, but you shall have her.” She gave him a hollowed-out carrot to which six mice were harnessed, and Dummling said sadly, “What shall I do with that?” The toad answered that he should take one of her little toads and put it into the carriage. He took one at random out of the circle and put it in the yellow carriage. It had scarcely sat down before it was transformed into a beautiful girl, the carrot into a coach, and the six mice into six horses. He kissed the girl and drove away with the horses and brought her to the king. His brothers, who had not taken any trouble to look for a beautiful woman, came back with the first two peasant women they met. When the king saw them he said, “The kingdom goes to the youngest after my death.” But the two brothers again deafened the king with their cries, saying that they couldn’t permit that, and requested that the one whose wife could jump through a ring which hung in the middle of the room should have the preference. They thought that the peasant women would be able to do that because they would be strong but that the delicate girl would jump to her death. The old king agreed, and the two peasant women jumped through the ring, but they were so awkward that they fell and broke their thick arms and legs. Thereupon the beautiful girl whom Dummling had brought sprang as lightly as a deer through the ring. So no further objection was possible. Dummling got the crown and ruled in wisdom for a long time.

  You will probably recognize in this simple classical story an accumulation of well-known motifs. Bolte and Polivka say that this fairy tale was found by the Grimms in 1819 in Zwehrn, Germany, and that there is also another German version, from the region of Hesse, which has slight variations.23 I don’t wish to repeat the whole story, but in this other version, instead of a carpet it is linen, and when Dummling goes down into the earth he does not find toads but a beautiful girl who is weaving linen, so there is not quite the same problem. She also gives him a carpet and only turns into a frog when she comes up to the surface of the earth, which means that under the ground she appears to him as a beautiful woman, but as soon as she comes to join him on the earth she turns into a frog. When the frog arrives at the king’s court in the carriage, it cries out, “Kiss me and versenk dich.” Versenken really intimates meditation, so it would mean “sink down into yourself in meditation”—which seems a very strange expression for a frog in a fairy tale. It repeats this three times, so Dummling takes the frog and jumps into the water with it, for he has understood versenken as meaning that he should submerge himself in the water, which is also a meaning of the word. The moment he kisses it and jumps into the water, it turns back into a beautiful woman.

  There are other Hessian variations where the three feathers are replaced by three apples which are rolled in different directions, and there is a French variation where the only change is that the toad is replaced by a white cat. I will not repeat all the possibilities but will mention a few of the more frequent ones. Often the motif of the feathers is replaced by arrows which the father shoots in three directions. And then the bride is either a toad, a frog, a white cat, an ape, a lizard, a puppet, a rat, a stocking, or a hopping nightcap—not even living objects—and sometimes a turtle.

  At the end of all these variations—among which the Russian are the most interesting—there is a short annotation explaining that the motif of blowing a feather to indicate the direction the sons should take was a general medieval custom in many countries. If people did not know where to go, if they were lost at a crossroads or had no special plan, they would take a feather, blow on it, and walk in whichever direction the wind took it. That was a very common kind of oracle by which you could be guided. There are many medieval stories referring to this and even folklore expressions such as “I shall go where the feather blows.” In northern countries and in certain Russian and Italian versions, instead of feathers and arrows or rolling apples, there are spheres or balls.

  We will begin with the first few sentences. Our exposition runs: There was a king who had three sons. Two were intelligent, the third stupid, and the old king did not know to whom he should give his kingdom. That shows the opening psychological situation. The last sentence sets the problem, which is who should have the kingdom.

  The opening situation of the king and his three sons is exceedingly frequent. The Grimm collection alone, which is merely a fraction of all exciting possibilities, has at least fifty or sixty such stories that start off with the king and his three sons. That is not the normal family, for there is neither mother nor sister, and the initial setup of people is purely masculine. The female element, which you expect in a complete family, is not represented. The main action is concerned with the finding of the right female, upon which depends the inheritance of the kingdom. One further point is that the hero does not perform any masculine deeds. He is not a hero in the proper sense of the word. He is helped all the time by the feminine element, which solves the whole problem for him and performs all the necessary deeds such as weaving the carpet and jumping through the ring. The story ends with a marriage—a balanced union of the male and female elements. So the general structure seems to point to a problem in which there is a dominating male attitude, a situation which lacks the feminine element, and the story tells us how the missing feminine is brought up and restored.

  We have first to take the symbolism of the king. An expanded study of
the king in alchemy is to be found in the section headed “Rex and Regina” in Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis.24 Jung brings in much other material, but I shall now only briefly condense what he says about the king.

  In primitive societies the king or the chief of the tribe generally has magical qualities; he has mana. Certain chiefs, for instance, are so sacred that they may not touch the earth and are always carried by their people. In other tribes the vessels that the king has used for eating and drinking are thrown away and nobody may touch them; they are taboo. Some chiefs and kings are never seen because of a similar taboo; if you were to look at the king’s face, you would die. Of certain chiefs it is said that their voices thunder and their eyes emanate lightning. In many primitive societies, the prosperity of the whole country depends on the health and state of mind of the king, and if he becomes impotent or ill, he has to be killed and replaced by another king whose health and potency guarantee the fertility of the women and cattle as well as the prosperity of the whole tribe. Frazer mentions instances in which it is not customary to wait until the king becomes impotent or sick but instead he is killed at the end of a certain period—say, after five, ten, or fifteen years—with the same idea in mind: namely, that he is worn out periodically and must be replaced. In certain tribes the idea prevails that this means not really killing the king, who embodies a kind of protective or ancestral spirit for the tribe, but simply a change of location: the old house is pulled down so that the spirit can move into a new one and continue to reign in that. It is believed to be always the same sacred, totemistic spirit that rules, and the killing of the king provides it with a better physical vessel.

  We can say, therefore, that the king or chief incorporates a divine principle on which the entire welfare—psychic and physical—of the nation depends. He represents the divine principle in its visible form; he is its incarnation or embodiment, its dwelling place. In his body lives the totem spirit of the tribe. He therefore has many characteristics that would incline us to look at him as a symbol of the Self, because the Self, according to our definition, is the center of the self-regulating system of the psyche, on which the welfare of the individual depends. (Our own kings often held the sphere of the earth-ball, with the cross on it if the king was a Christian, and they carried a number of other symbols which we know from various mythological setups represent the Self.)

  In many tribes there is a split between medicine man and king or chief—that is, between spiritual and worldly power—and the same thing happened in our civilization in the terrible fight between sacerdotium and imperium (church and state) in the Middle Ages. Both these powers claimed to be visible, incarnate symbols of the divine principle for their subjects—or, one could say, symbols of the unobservable archetype of the Self.

  In all countries and in alchemical symbolism, which you can read about in Jung’s book, you see this dominating idea that the aging king is unsatisfactory in some way. In primitive tribes, when he is impotent, the harem whispers that around and the tribe silently decides to kill him. Or he may be unsatisfactory in other ways: he may be too old to perform certain tasks any longer, or his time is over—he has reigned his ten or fifteen years. Then comes the inevitable idea of the king’s sacrificial death.

  In more advanced civilizations, as, for instance, in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the practice was replaced by a ritual of renewal, a symbolic death and resurrection of the king, as was performed in the Sed festival. In other countries there was a so-called carnival king. Some criminal who had been condemned to death was allowed to live for three days as a king. He was clothed as a king, had all the insignia, was taken out of prison, and could order whatever he liked. He could have all the women he wanted, all the good dinners he liked, and everything else, and after three days he was executed. There are other rituals where the process of killing is carried out on a puppet which is “killed” instead of the king. Behind these different traditions we see the same motif—that of the necessity for the king to be renewed through death and rebirth.

  If you apply that to our hypothesis that the king is a symbol of the Self, you have to ask: why does a symbol of the Self age? Do we know any psychological factors that correspond to this fact? If you study the comparative history of religions, you will note the tendency for any religious ritual or dogma that has become conscious to wear out after a time, to lose its original emotional impact and become a dead formula. Although it also acquires the positive qualities of consciousness, such as continuity, it loses the irrational contact with the flow of life and tends to become mechanical. This is true not only of religious doctrines and political systems but for everything else as well, because when something has long been conscious, the wine goes out of the bottle. It becomes a dead world. Therefore, if our conscious life is to avoid petrifaction, there is a necessity for constant renewal by contact with the flow of psychic events in the unconscious, and the king, being the dominant and most central symbol in the contents of the collective unconscious, is naturally subject to this need to an even greater extent.

  You can therefore say that the symbol of the Self is especially exposed to this general difficulty of needing the constant renewal of understanding and contact, that it is especially threatened by the possibility of becoming a dead formula—a system and doctrine emptied of its meaning and therefore purely an outer form. In that sense we can say that the aging king represents a dominant content of collective consciousness and underlies all the political and religious doctrines of a social group. In the East, for many layers of the population, this content appeared as the Buddha, and with us, until now, it was Christ, who actually has the title King of Kings.

  In our story the king apparently has no wife, or, if he has one, she does not appear. What would the queen represent? If we take the king as representing a central and dominant symbolic content of collective consciousness, then the queen would be its accompanying feminine element—the emotions, feelings, the irrational attachments to this dominant content. It can be said that in every civilization there is a Weltanschauung with a central God-image which dominates that civilization, and with that goes a certain habit or style of life, a feeling style, and that Eros style in society influences how people relate to one another. The feeling tone of this collectivity would be the queen who accompanies the king; for instance, in the Middle Ages the Gothic idea of Christ would be incarnate in the king of that time, while the representations of Eros—to be found in the poems of the Troubadours—would be manifested in the Virgin Mary, who is the Queen of Heaven related to the King—Christ. She set the pattern for feminine behavior, the pattern for the man’s anima as well as for women. In Catholic countries women still naturally tend to adapt to that pattern, and men try to educate their anima to fit into this style of erotic behavior and this style of relationship.

  So you see the close connection between the king and the queen, the Logos principle dominating a certain civilization and collective attitude, and the Eros style accompanying it in a specific form. That the queen is lacking means that the latter aspect has been lost and therefore the king is sterile. Without the queen he can have no more children. We must assume, therefore, that the story has to do with the problem of a dominant collective attitude in which the principle of Eros—of relatedness to the unconscious, to the irrational, the feminine—has been lost. This must refer to a situation where collective consciousness has become petrified and has stiffened into doctrines and formulas.

  Now this king has three sons, so there is the problem of four males, three of whom are adapted in the way they should be while the fourth is below the mark. Naturally, people who know Jungian psychology will jump to the conclusion that those are obviously the four functions of consciousness: the king being the dominant or main function and the two elder sons being the auxiliary functions, while Dummling would be of course the fourth, inferior function. This is right, but only with a grain of salt because Jung’s theory of the four functions refers to an individual. In fairy tales we do not have
the inner story of one individual and therefore cannot look at it from this angle. We have, rather, to amplify the motif of the male quaternio first and there we find—in past history, for instance—motifs such as the four sons of Horus, the four Evangelists, and other quaternios, surrounding a main symbol of the Self.

  These quaternios to be found in the comparative history of religion and in mythology cannot, to my mind, be interpreted as the four functions as they appear in an individual. They represent a more basic pattern of consciousness, from which the four-functional pattern of consciousness is derived. If we know how to diagnose a type and have a number of people before us, we can say that this man is a thinking type and his inferior feeling probably makes such and such trouble. Thus you can say that certain aspects of the setup are typical, while others are more individual. So it can be said that the problem of the four functions always appears in an individual in a certain setup, but that there are general basic trends underneath. Finally, if you want to puzzle, you say: why on earth does human consciousness tend always to develop four functions in each person? And there you can reply that it seems to be an inborn disposition of the human being to build up a four-functional conscious system. If you do not influence a child, he or she will automatically develop one conscious function, and if you analyze that person at the age of thirty or forty, you will find this fourfunctional structure. The underlying general disposition is mirrored in the many quaternarian symbols in mythology, such as the four winds, the four directions of the compass, and also these four royal figures in our fairy tale.